OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
The AI shutdown problem is, roughly, the problem of getting future advanced (agentic) AI systems to shut down when and only when we want them to. Thornley (2023) proved some theorems showing that an agent satisfying some rather minimal rationality criteria precludes it from being both capable and shutdownable. However, by denying the completeness axiom of utility theory, he manages to characterise a capable and shutdownable agent. A seemingly relevant condition for an agent to be capably goal-directed is that it avoids sequences of actions that foreseeably leave it worse off. My project proposes a choice rule which, as I derive, guarantees the dynamic consistency of agents with incomplete preferences.
